HUMBLE WINNERS
Antonio Carlos A. Telles
“I was lucky. When God rained manna from heaven, I had a spoon.” – Peter Drucker (1)
“Want To Do Big Things? Make Yourself Small! –Dov Seidman, CEO of LRN (2)
There are many paths to success. And they are paradoxical, like success itself. Humility, for example, if recognized and harnessed as a “strength”, and not as a “weakness”, can be a key element in creating the kind of leader the world urgently needs. In “Building a Win-Win World”, Hazel Henderson, a consultant from the Calvert Social Investment Fund, states that “we must learn humility if we are to face the complexities we have created” and highlights the “airy arrogance” that dominates “some of our concepts of management and administration.”
“Without humility, it is impossible to recognize opportunities for improvement, since arrogance is based on the belief that one does not need to improve,” says Fredy Kofman, former Vice President at LinkedIn for Leadership and Organizational Development and professor at the Sloan School of Management at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
The arrogance (of believing or claiming that “we already know”) ranks on the list of the ten “enemies of learning”. A saying of the Navajo Indians affirms that “it is impossible to awaken someone who is pretending to be asleep.”
Humility is one of the 45 virtues examined by Robert Solomon, a business ethics consultant, in his book “The Best Way of Doing Business – How Personal Integrity Leads to Corporate Success” (1999). He notes that in Chinese philosophy the word for “virtue” (“Te”, in Chinese) is also understood as “power”. In Aristotle’s view, virtue is the midway point between “excess” and “deficiency” of a trait of human nature. According to Solomon, humility basically means “not to think too highly of yourself and try to give proper credit to others where credit is due.” When it is in excess, it is self-flagellation, humiliation. When there is a deficiency it is arrogance, false pride, authoritarianism, impudence.
Does concrete evidence exist that humility is a relevant and pertinent virtue for the effective management and success of organizations?
The Level 5 Leadership model explored in the book “Good to Great” (2001) can provide help for answering this question: “an individual who blends extreme personal humility with intense professional will”. This was one of the conclusions of a project, comprised of 15,000 hours of work, spanning a period of five years (1997-2001), with a staff of 21 people, coordinated by Jim Collins, a former professor at Stanford University and co-author of “Built to Last” (1995). According to the parameters of excellence established in the research, it was only possible to select eleven companies from the Fortune 500 list, based on a 30-year period from 1965 to 1995, and 1,435 companies were studied.
LEVEL 5 LEADEARSHIP:
- PROFESSIONAL WILL – Looks at the mirror, not out the window to apportion responsibility for poor results, never blaming other people, external factors or bad luck.
- PERSONAL HUMILITY – Looks out the window, not in the mirror, to apportion credit…to external factors and good luck.
According to Collins, Level 5 Leadership “cuts against the grain of conventional wisdom, especially the belief that we need larger-than-life saviors with big personalities to transform companies.” Commenting on this research, Peter Drucker, often hailed as the “father of modern management”, says that it “brings into disrepute most management fads such as the cult of the CEO superman.”
However, when we envisage humility more as a “strength” than a “weakness”, it is not the absence or presence of a certain type of radiance or magnetic personality that we seek to highlight. In a civilization where the overvaluation of “appearance” often prevents valuing the “essence”, then restoring humility as a strength is something quite promising. However, we need to have “eyes to see”, as Jesus, a wise spiritual leader, counseled over 2,000 years ago, since a seemingly modest person may actually be extremely arrogant. Likewise, the charisma of a certain leader does not stop him from being humble.
The great Brazilian political leader Juscelino Kubitschek (JK) is an example of this. In the book, “JK, The Artist of the Impossible” (2001) by Cláudio Bojunga – Director of Journalism of Educational TV – the philologist and lexicographer Antônio Houaiss (elected chairman of the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1995), who worked on presidential documentation, drew a profile of JK as: “an open man, a listener… He would receive new information and permanently assimilate it, realigning his spirit. He was grateful to those who presented him with unusual perspectives. He had no ideological preconceptions: he listened to opponents and dissenting opinions. He maintained a democratic and free dialogue with direct counselors and would quietly listen to the divergent positions of assistants, relying more on objections than direct praise.”
Thus, identification of the power of humility is related more to “essence” than “appearance”. There is also a paradoxical and dual aspect to the concept of humility as a strength. On the one hand, it means recognizing “smallness” (limitations). On the other hand, it means self-affirmation – acknowledging one’s own “greatness” (enormous potential). The humble winners are those who seek after a balance between these opposing and complementary tendencies. They are continually learning. They learn to “like what they do”, but pursue their specific vocation to “do what they like”. In a press interview, in 1984, the great poet Carlos Drumond de Andrade said he did not exactly feel like a writer, but a person who likes to write.
Humility, as an ethical management principle, will set apart the leaders of the future, since the lasting success of organizations depends on their ability to value cooperation and people who know how to rise above themselves.
(1) Tarrant, John C., Drucker: The Man Who Invented the Corporate Society ,1976
* Published in the Newsletter of the Brazilian Association of Human Resources, ABRH- Brasília, 2003 (revised: January 19, 2017)
